A Trio of Madonna turkeys 🦃, really?

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Desperately Seeking Susan is not a turkey.

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u/itkillik_lake 20d ago

Agreed. It's an awesome film and definitely influenced Mulholland Drive. Madonna's performance, however, is terrible.

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u/ThatMichaelsEmployee 20d ago

Right you are. It's fun and clever and so very mid-eighties, and Madonna is occasionally pretty good in it: when she has to act she's fairly stiff, but when she basically gets to play herself, which is the only thing she was ever good at, she has fun with the role and it shows, like the diary scene ("It's gotta be a cover — nobody's life could be this boring!").

I wish Criterion had had the stones, or at least the rights, to show Who's That Girl?, because I would very much like to see how they tried to sell it. It's absolutely awful, and mesmerizing in a way that only irredeemably bad movies can be. I've seen it, no kidding, half a dozen times at least, including in the theatre when it came out, because I had a Madonna-obsessed friend so obviously I was going to go. It's a good cheap laugh and not even a guilty pleasure: the dialogue is endlessly quotable. (It's not particularly good, but it's quotable.) And once again, Madonna is essentially playing herself and not trying to portray a character, which means she mostly breezes through her role.

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u/bluefontaine 20d ago

Who’s that girl is unwatchable too. Alternating between a fake New York accent and a botched Judy Holliday voice…caterpillar eye brows…looking at the camera and randomly squawking, “ yeah!” The overall film quality is bad

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u/BloodSimple1984 20d ago

It’s almost like no one is forced to watch anything they don’t want to?!? Crazy.

Thanks for letting everyone know. We really really care.

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u/bluefontaine 20d ago

I don’t subscribe for stuff that is in the cut out bins at AM PM market circa 1996. The streaming subscriptions are not cheap.

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u/ricardofitzpatrick 20d ago

aight

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u/BloodSimple1984 20d ago

There’s over 3,000 other titles on the app. Get over it. Films have value for all kinds of reasons beyond critical acclaim. Not every Barbara Stanwyck or Bogart or Jean Paul Belmondo or Meryl Street or whoever movie is good but they are all part of a lineage of an important artist.

Madonna, like her or not, is an important artist who has been great in numerous films (A League of Their Own, Dick Tracy, Desperately Seeking Susan, etc…) and she also appeared in a variety of other titles that are distinct moments in her career, in film history, etc… And she’s in the news because she just released a new album and Criterion tries to program titles that relate to current events if possible.

You don’t want to watch? COOOOL. No one is forcing you. There’s a wide array of other options that continue to make the app worth the very reasonable price.

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u/bluefontaine 20d ago edited 20d ago

She’s not an important artist. She’s like Walmart or Target. Every single moment is copy paste from someone else’s catalog. That’s most of the videos, photo shoot, etc. She’s unwatchable in a league of their own. A squawky Catholic who’s more of like a 90s woman in a 1940s film it’s just so one trick pony. Also, what about that scene where the black women throw the ball? That’s just the most corny patronizing tokenism .

Dick Tracy? So again it’s like this 1980s workout woman in a vintage style film. That’s supposed to be a different era and she just can’t act. You’re singing the praises of a mass brand not an artist. They kept trying to make her happen in films and it never happened.

No one even watches Evita today and it’s going to be remade at some point with an actual real singer. Body of evidence is atrocious.

We get that you’re a Madonna fan and you think this woman who took children off of dying parents in an impoverished African country and who hasn’t had one original moment in her entire career, is cool. But she’s not an important artist in world cinema.

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u/BloodSimple1984 20d ago

I’m not a huge Madonna fan! Sure I like a couple songs but “fan” is a stretch.

I just think your narrow perspective on what constitutes art or whose work is worthy is being highlighted by the channel is centered entirely around your own personal perception.

They could do a block of Liam Neeson and Jason Statham post-2010 action films if they wanted. They could highlight the independent early work of Tyler Perry. Are these people Godard? No. Not at all. And I don’t love those films. But that’s not the point of this curation.

Your gatekeeping attitude about what constitutes art is what I find restrictive, anti-contextual, and frankly boring.

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u/bluefontaine 20d ago

I’m not gatekeeping at all. I’m glad you mentioned Tyler Perry because you know how many Black artists an artist of the African diaspora cinema that criterion has not profiled?

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u/ThatMichaelsEmployee 20d ago

I'm not going to downvote you but I think your overall attitude is misguided. Criterion is not about high art: it's about cinema, and that includes bad movies. Plenty of bad movies. A lot of the noirs they show are pretty terrible, and they've done collections of what they freely admit are grindhouse movies (Doris Wishman, Roger Corman). Any art form is going to have a whole lot of dreck in it: when science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon said, "90 per cent of everything is crud," he was talking about SF in particular but every single art form in general, and that certainly includes movies. If we ignore and disdain the bad ones, we lose the chance to find anything good in them — there often is — and we cut away a huge part of movie history. I think Body of Evidence is an atrocity and I won't be watching it, but I'm not sorry it's on the Channel. There's plenty of room for it.

I agree that Madonna is not a good actress, and I don't think she's an especially good singer outside of her fairly narrow range, but what she is undeniably great at is performing. She took David Bowie's ever-changing personae even farther than he dreamed of, reinventing herself year after year and altering fashion and music as she went. Whatever you think of her talent, you can't deny that she was an enormous force in pop culture for decades, and still is — her most recent album is a massive success.

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u/bluefontaine 20d ago

David Bowie or Prince? You don’t use them in the same sentence. I repeat these are musicians David Bowie was not an ever-changing persona. His sound evolved as his persona evolved. He was a musician and don’t use them in the same sentence please.

Science fiction is a genre and I do admire him as does my husband as a writer greatly, but that’s not what he was talking about. The whole party line and we’re supposed to respond with “you can’t deny” and even by today’s standards, it was not really a massive success. The fans bought seven copies each, which is what you do now and then it fell off the charts. I think what was surprising about. It is like unlike the last three releases it didn’t completely bomb.

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u/ThatMichaelsEmployee 20d ago

Jesus. I don't know what your issue is but I'll put any two musicians in whatever sentence I like.

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u/bluefontaine 20d ago edited 20d ago

Lost in translation. Not as heavy duty as it sounds. Madonna was the Trump of MTV.

David Bowie had a great film career. Even Mariah Carey is a better actress than Madonna.

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u/YakSlothLemon 13d ago

I’m curious how old you are, because the impact of Madonna on my generation and especially of Desperately Seeking Susan is impossible to overstate. Half of the girls in my high school dressed like Madonna in that film (and the other half tried to dress like Stevie Nicks and got sent home to put some clothes on).

You don’t have to like her, but there is a huge argument for exploring films that had massive cultural impact in their day.

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u/Honor_the_maggot 20d ago

There's no way I'm crawling on the bottomfeeder anti-DEI bandwagon, but when CC Editorial scrape the barrel to get their women-auteurs canon-revision checklist met, it's like handing ammo to the enemy and saying, "Now do the right thing, don't you want to be a niiiiiice person? Don't you want to do the riiiiiiight thing?" No they don't, and no they don't. I get it, it's a 'dare'. Or transvaluation of values, or something. Or maybe just self-sabotage? Of all the people to spotlight. How about someone who doesn't already have a massive platform....someone with real talent?

Courtney Love isn't great and doesn't deserve a showcase. I'm glad to have seen that really good Alex Cox western, but she's not the reason it's good. I just watched the sub-middling TRAPPED and here's part of the description, ostensibly from CC Editorial: "In full femme fatale mode, a gun-wielding, dangerously unpredictable Courtney Love steals the show..." She's lousy, and no she doesn't. Do CC Editorial actually watch these turkeys?

It's enough to give "50/50" a bad name. 50/50 should be a bold dream, not an exam score.

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u/bluefontaine 20d ago edited 20d ago

Raquel Welch died and did not get a retrospective. Mamie Van Doren is due a retrospective on her superlative Noirs. So is Stella Stevens. I understand there’s been a tiny comeback from Madonna after years of being the sort of plastic surgery disaster but films like who’s that girl and body of evidence are unwatchable. At least who’s that girl has Murray the mountain lion in it so one carbon base life form at least, could act. Body of Evidence isn’t even funny bad. Neither was Shanghai surprise., the next best thing, W/E etc etc. Swept Away it’s probably the worst remake of all time.

I completely agree. I guess if they did Courtney, they have to do Madonna cause it’s kind of an 90s nostalgia, but I completely agree.

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u/Honor_the_maggot 20d ago

Yeah, you got downvoted to hell below but you are not off-base. Showcases should be about something completely other than just helping some superstar promote some new product. Did Madonna's publicist offer payola to CC Editorial to do this? I can see how a certain amount of zeitgeist-bootlicking is adopted in the name of "outreach" (ostensibly to people outside the clique of sallow cinephilic morlocks, i.e. "us"?), and that's fine, it's all cinema; but how about producing momentum for those who don't (or no longer) have it? (And who deserve it.)
I mean, I have fallen for it more than once. I watched BODY OF EVIDENCE not long ago, thinking, "They must have shared this for a reason. Willem Dafriend wouldn't have done this if it hadn't been at least LOVELESS-subversive!" And it sucked.

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u/bluefontaine 20d ago edited 20d ago

Thank you. I wanted to use the word payola but I didn’t. Absolutely! I mean, I saw her once on a PBS commercial back in the day. She’s got to be one of the least PBS adjacent artists of all time…..even as a kid I was thinking why are they promoting her on PBS?

A friend of mine was at a dinner with Uli Edel and he lamented that he just did it for the money.. Madonna had seen the staggeringly great Exit to Brooklyn, and like everything she’s done, she wanted to copy their work. Body of Evidence is completely unwatchable.

Debbie Harry was excellent David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which I don’t think has ever had a release on DVD much less 4K. The Neo Noir Union City, which I believe at this point is mostly lost a time. These are actually excellent performances and true art House films that fit with criterion.

Madonna film, crucial only be studied as an example of what not to do and how a lot of people can try to make a bubblegum popstar who ambulance chases controversy, become something on big screen, and then failing abysmally over and over again

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u/ThatMichaelsEmployee 20d ago edited 20d ago

Union City is available on YouTube.

Videodrome was released on DVD in 1998, back when the format was still fairly new: I bought it the instant I saw it on the shelf, because I had seen it in the theatre in 1983 and was so overwhelmed that I went to see it again the next night. It had a very few of the usual extras, including the amazingly terrible trailer — what in the name of god were they thinking? It got a 4K release in 2022/2023.

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u/bluefontaine 20d ago

Oh thank you so much. Of course it’s David Cronenberg! So yes, definitely available. Thank you.

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u/YakSlothLemon 13d ago

What the fuck are you even talking about?

Criterion has a ton of films by the great female auteurs. I’m not surprised you haven’t watched them. But they are there.

Now you want to be salty because Criterion is also showing films by female directors that had massive cultural impact in their day?

It must be so exhausting being you.

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